[drewcrawford]

> Think about how terrible a bus is, and how most of us use cars because it's an immensely better experience.

Yeah but most of America is basically stuck in one at least twice a day, so you have a massive demand to make them comfortable. Whereas with a plane, your middle-class American gets in one 2-3 times a year and is willing to suck it up.

In order to be comparable to cars, you not only have to hypothesize an order of magnitude shift in cost to match cars, but also an order of magnitude shift in demand to match cars. While I fully admit that there is that sort of demand in limited markets (for example, commuting programmers to the valley), these markets are not on the same chart as car demand. I do not really see what could possibly motivate ordinary people to travel 600 miles twice per day.

Meanwhile, as you've been trying to leapfrog the car market, it has not remained stagnant. If you are a knowledge worker, a self-driving car is an effective substitute for flight, since the impact of additional passive travel time is negligible. (Even non-knowledge workers need sleep, so it will be of benefit to them too.) At the distances I generally travel (regional US), an uninterrupted block of 8 hours in a vehicle is actually preferable to a 2-hour block flying, so I would actually pay less to travel by plane.